Features

Living in fear

January was a particularly violent month in Sweden. A 63-year-old man was killed in Stockholm by a hand grenade lying in the street. A Dutch exchange student was hit by a stray bullet during an execution-style killing at a pizza restaurant in Uppsala. In Gothenburg, a hand grenade was thrown into a flat and exploded

Add dwarf to cart

You’re planning a party. You’ve hired the vaults of a former bank, Le Caprice is doing the catering, and a celebrity DJ will round things off on the dance floor — but you want that little bit extra to give your fashionable, jaded guests something to remember. What about a dwarf? It’s a curious fact

17 reasons to love Brexit

‘But what are you going to do with the powers?’ the minister asked, while I negotiated devolution of powers to London when Boris was mayor. The government wouldn’t grant powers unless we explained how we would use them. And that is what is missing in the Brexit non-debate. We are ‘taking back control’ — but

A very minor prophet

Now that I seem to have become a prophet of doom, I wonder whether I should have been a guru instead. Doom doesn’t sell. Bookshops hide my books in back rooms. My recorded harangues and TV appearances reach a few thousand dedicated YouTube enthusiasts. But Dr Jordan B. Peterson, supposedly as reactionary as I am,

Crisis of conscience

In 1989, the year Soviet communism collapsed, John O’Sullivan, Margaret Thatcher’s former speechwriter, gave the world O’Sullivan’s First Law of Politics. ‘All organisations that are not actually right wing,’ he pronounced, ‘will over time become left wing.’ No one who watched Amnesty International’s descent from austere principle to cultural relativism can deny he spoke with

Freddy Gray

The man who wouldn’t be president

Boris Titov is running to be president of Russia, but he’s eager to talk himself out of the job. ‘I am not a good politician,’ he says, over breakfast at the Lanesborough hotel in Knightsbridge. ‘To be a president means you need to be wise, a big politician like Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan Yew.

MenToo

These are tough times for what I call the #MeToo Men — those white, liberal, high-minded men who pride themselves on being good feminists. Disgusted with Trump and horrified by Harvey, they want to show solidarity and be good allies to the women of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. So they wear their feminist

Inside out

‘I murder people!’ says Elanger matter-of-factly in response to my question about what he does for a living. From the comfort of my home in the UK, I have managed to get in touch, through contacts of contacts on Facebook, with someone serving 19 years in prison for double murder in Venezuela. The country has

A robot to love

‘I gotta be me,’ Sammy Davis Jr. croons as the android Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) steadies her horse, stands up on her stirrups, takes aim with her Winchester, and picks off her human masters one by one. The trailer’s out at last and the futuristic TV series Westworld is set to return in the

A new Europe | 25 January 2018

The occasion was a central European conference on the subversive disinformation campaigns of Putin’s Russia (which, incidentally, are real, subtle, and potentially effective). The speaker was an American warning that the central European democracies were in imminent danger of succumbing to the lures of authoritarian populism, even of abandoning democracy itself, under this influence. He

Admission of failure

I am in a good position to report from the NHS frontline, having been in hospital with pneumonia for just over a week from 28 December. I was admitted following an early evening visit from a district nurse to the home I share with my younger daughter, her husband and their three children. The nurse

A huff to the music of time

You’re in the index, but not in the book. This ghostly sensation has been my experience since 1990 after commissioning Auberon Waugh to review Anthony Powell’s Miscellaneous Verdicts. Waugh’s verdict appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on 20 May that year. Next morning, Powell resigned in a celebrated huff from the sister paper, of which I

Damian Thompson

Momentum isn’t hard left. It’s a theatrical cult

Hard left, my arse. Sorry to be vulgar, but surely that’s how Jim Royle, couch-potato patriarch of that glorious sitcom The Royle Family, would have reacted to reports that the ‘hard left’ Momentum movement is planning a ‘massacre of the moderates’ in the parliamentary Labour party. Don’t get me wrong. Having seized control of Labour’s

Jenny McCartney

The new feminist war: young women vs old women

The #MeToo movement began, I thought, primarily to allow women to speak out about harassment from men, which they had previously found too intimidating to declare openly. What is striking is how quickly it has turned into a row between women. Social media is crackling with barely concealed inter-generational rage between feminists of different vintages.

The great plastic panic

Has an albatross ever wielded so much influence? The bewildered chick who regurgitated a plastic bag in front of Sir David Attenborough’s camera crew — fed to him by his mother after she had scooped it from the sea — has caused one of those regular ructions in public opinion. The supermarket chain Iceland has

Red sunset, red dawn

Last year, more than 15,000 communists gathered in the Russian seaside town of Sochi for a week-long commemoration of the centenary of Lenin’s revolution. Nearly every nation was represented. Stalls manned by party members from Zimbabwe, Greece, Cuba and India lined the narrow concourse of the event’s main piazza. Under the eye of the Russian